The Ruling Class, Big Clique, and "Why Don't the Republicans Do X?"

RUSH: Once in a while -- it doesn't happen very often -- once in a while you stumble across an article, an essay that demands to be widely disseminated. This one that I stumbled across is from the July-August issue of the American Spectator, and the title is: "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution." It's by Angelo Codevilla. Ladies and gentlemen, it prints out to 16 pages. Have you read it, Snerdley? It prints out to 16 pages. I could read the whole thing to you, and only I have the ability to probably do that without boring you to tears and sending you elsewhere. But I'm not even going to try to do that. It is so good, it is so timely, it is so thorough and complete, it's difficult to cherry-pick. It's difficult to pick a couple or three pull quotes to give you an idea. The reason this appeals to me is that it dovetails with something that I have been trying to explain for 20 years on this program, and it's come to a head now with the election of Obama. And, you know, for 20 years I have gotten the question, "Rush, why don't the Republicans do X?" And I have struggled to come up with answers to this question. Every time I'm asked, I search for a different answer.

One of the things I've always settled on to try to explain to people is that people never really get out of high school. That the whole concept of the big clique and wanting to be part of it dominates everybody's life: the quest for power, the quest for acceptance, the quest to be in the "in" crowd, however it's defined. I've told you over the years that one of the reasons the Republicans are whatever the way they are in Washington is because Washington is a culture and a place that is run and dominated, not just politically, but socially, and I've always said that this is crucial to understand, 'cause this is the big clique aspect. Washington is dominated politically and socially by Democrats, by the left. The Republicans also live there. Everybody wants to get along with who you live next to, and in Washington, the center of power in the world, everybody wants to be in the ruling class. The ruling class is the subject of this piece by Angelo Codevilla, who is professor emeritus at Boston University. It is just a wonderfully written and crafted piece.

Here's a couple pull quotes, but again, getting into various pull quotes will not do this piece justice: "Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits." This resonated with me because in explaining Obama to everyone. I said this is how he was raised; this is how he was educated; this is what he believes: America is the problem in the world -- so do members of the ruling class. The ruling class, it's important to understand, is not based on merit. In fact, the ruling class contains many educational failures. People who would otherwise have flunked out of college were it not for their connections to others in the ruling class.

Another pull quote: "Getting into America's 'top schools' is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. ... Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that 'the best' colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages," which explains in part why we've never seen Barack Obama's transcripts or his writings or anything else from Harvard or the Harvard Law Review because they don't exist. He was put in that position for reasons having nothing to do with merit, and the people in the ruling class do not rise on the basis of merit; they rise on the basis of connections, saying the right things, thinking the right things, doing the right things according to the code that is established.

We, in what Mr. Codevilla calls, the country class, meaning not the hick class, but the country, we are the country. The ruling class is a minority, and I have touched on this. We are being ruled, i.e., governed by a minority. Less than 10, 15% of Americans agree with the thought process, the philosophies, the goals and objectives of the ruling class. And we in the country class, we believe in merit. We rise or fall based on merit. We believe that a good GPA is what's necessary to get you into college. We believe that performing well on the job is how you get promoted and how you get paid well. Not true in the ruling class. In fact, that is looked down upon. It's sort of like the old money versus new money business. The old money, inherited from robber barons of the past, great wealth. The people who inherited it don't do anything for it, but it has great lineage. People who have earned great wealth rather than having inherited it are shunned by the old-money people because it's working class to have earned money.

It's just not done. It's considered gauche, it's considered filthy. And it's much the same way with merit throughout the ruling class. You don't have to be the best. In fact, if you do the right things and say the right things, you can be an abject failure meritocracy-wise and still be promoted.

This resonated with me in so many ways. I grew up wanting to be in radio, and when I moved to New York in 1988 my objective was to become the most listened to person on radio. Not top five, not top ten, but the most listened to. And I did it. It didn't count for anything with those people. And yet there are people who never have had any audience, who still don't have any audience, who are widely accepted members of the ruling class, who are considered very powerful simply because they walk the walk, they talk the talk, they kiss the right rear ends and do all of this. But the point is these people are a minority, and they have no relationship to the rest of us in the country class. And somehow we are now being ruled by these people. We're not being governed. We're being ruled by them. And they have certain beliefs right now. Among them is that the United States is the problem in the world. Among them is that those of us not in the ruling class haven't the smarts, haven't the ability to know what's best for ourselves. They have to do it for us.

There's a story that this explains in great detail. There was a Washington Post story on Sunday. A lot of people sent this to me. "Rush, Rush, Rush, look at this. Look at Trent Lott's quotes, look at this! What are the Republicans doing?" Same old question. I was inundated with e-mail about this. Here's the headline, and it's by Shailagh Murray. "Republican Lawmakers Gird for Rowdy Tea Party -- So who wants to join Rand Paul's 'tea-party' caucus? 'I don't know about that,' Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) replied with a nervous laugh. 'I'm not sure I should be participating in this story.' Republican lawmakers see plenty of good in the Tea Party, but they also see reasons to worry. The movement, which has ignited passion among conservative voters and pushed big government to the forefront of the 2010 election debate, has also stirred quite a bit of controversy. Voters who don't want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the Tea Party and the Republican Party as one and the same.

"Paul, the GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, floated the idea of forming an official caucus for tea-party-minded senators in an interview in the National Review as one way he would shake up Washington. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), one of the movement's favorite incumbents, filed paperwork on Thursday to register a similar group in the House 'to promote Americans' call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government.'" And there you have the Tea Party, and that threatens establishment Republicans. And people say, "Why?" How in the world could this threaten established Republicans? We think this is the ticket to victory. We think there's never been a greater opportunity to contrast what we believe with what is happening. We are watching our country be bankrupted right in front of our eyes and they're smiling and laughing at us while they do it, and the Republicans to one degree or another are joining in.

"Some Republicans worry that tea-party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected." Really? So here the Tea Party represents the salvation -- remember when I have said, and you know this, that Reagan was considered an embarrassment to the Republican upper class? They agreed with Tip O'Neill, Reagan was a dunce. They couldn't do much about it because the guy won landslides. But they had no appreciation for him. These are the people who are embarrassed of the pro-life movement, 'cause they have to go to Republican conventions with those people. And their friends in the Democrat side of the ruling class tease them and give them grief over being at a party with a bunch of hayseed hick pro-lifers, which is not acceptable thinking, pro-lifism, not acceptable thinking in the ruling class.

"Some Republicans worry that tea-party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected. Paul, who beat GOP establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky's primary, told the National Review that he would seek to join forces with GOP Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.), 'who are unafraid to stand up' and who have blocked numerous bills advanced by both parties deemed by the pair as expanding government." And here we get to the meat of the piece. "Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. 'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,' Lott said in an interview. 'As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.'" And he's not even in the Senate! He's now a lobbyist. So all of you looking at the Tea Party thinking it's the Republican Party's salvation, the Republican members of the ruling class are just as threatened by the Tea Party as the Democrats are. Because the Tea Party is outsiders; the Tea Party is not in the big clique; the Tea Party does not want to be in the big clique. The Tea Party wants to wrest power away from the big clique. The problem, and as Mr. Codevilla's piece points out is, what vehicle does the Tea Party use?

It gets really interesting. This I will share with you, it's the end of the piece. The only vehicle available to the Tea Party right now is the Republican Party. And what do they do? You and I, have we not, we have been saying -- well, some have said third-party route, clearly this piece demonstrates that's a failure, but others have been saying that the future of the country depends on the conservative movement retaking the Republican Party. Now, here we have people like Trent Lott, everybody's assumed is a conservative all along, now being threatened by the arrival of a Tea Party caucus, ah, ah, ah, ah, "'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.' But Lott said he's not expecting a tea-party sweep. 'I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people.'"

So he thinks that you, the American people will see the Tea Party for the rabble-rousers they are and will not elect anybody from the Tea Party or anybody who believes things the Tea Party believes because you really do not want Washington shaken up. You like the ruling class running the show. "Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who failed to survive his party's nominating process after running afoul of local tea-party activists, told a local Associated Press reporter last week that the GOP had jeopardized its chance to win Senate seats in Republican-leaning states such as Nevada and Kentucky and potentially in Colorado, where tea-party favorite Ken Buck has surged ahead of Lt. Gov. Jane Norton in their primary battle. Bennett warned that such candidates are stealing attention from top GOP recruits such as Mike Castle in Delaware and John Hoeven in North Dakota, both of whom are favored to win seats held by Democrats." But it is not in the cards for these Tea Party people to win. And this explains it, in part, this piece.

Now, it's at the American Spectator. We'll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com, as I say, we'll be talking about it extensively during the program today, along with all the other things in the news. It's 16 pages, much too long to read in its entirety here. But it explains so much, and it's so thorough, and it dovetails so nicely with some of the theories I have evolved to explain or answer your questions, "Why don't the Republicans do X?" You notice that Trent Lott displays more anger and more hostility toward any potential new conservative members of the Republican Party than he would ever display to even the most radical of his Democrat congressional colleagues, who led the charge to get him out of leadership in the Republican Party. But he was taken care of. He's now a lobbyist. It all works out. The ruling class takes care of its members who follow their own rules. Geithner is a perfect example. He's never held a real job in his life, doesn't have the slightest clue how to fix anything. He wouldn't know how to fix a broken lightbulb. He wouldn't know how to fix anything that's broken. The men in the country class are the fixers and they're looked upon with disdain.

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RUSH: Trent Lott's resignation became effective at 11:30 p.m. on December 18th, 2007. On January 7th, 2008, it was announced that Trent Lott and former Senator John Breaux (Democrat-Louisiana) had opened their lobbying firm about a block from the White House. The ruling class takes care of its own. And the ruling class is Democrats and liberals in Washington and everywhere -- New York, Washington. Washington is the power capital of the world and the financial capital of the world as well. The ruling class also does not work. The ruling class is involved in nonprofits. The ruling class seeks their wealth from government, and more and more and more people do. There's a story today in the stack. While the rest of the country in the Summer of Recovery is hurting, Washington is expanding. Washington's doing great. The people who live and work in the ruling class in Washington are prospering because government is prospering.

Government is prospering because government is raiding the private sector. Government's raiding the country class, if you will. The way this piece starts out: "As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' 'toxic assets' was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's 'systemic collapse.'" They all agreed. You and I did not. You and I fought this bailout, remember? They told us, "We have 24 hours! If we don't do this, the country collapses, the economy collapses." It finally took two weeks of persuasion by the ruling class to convince enough people because the Republicans, conservatives in the country, were not buying into it. They didn't believe any of it. The majority of the American people did not want the bailout yet it happened anyway, and look what it got us.

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RUSH: From Angelo Codevilla's piece, the American Spectator, July-August 2010 issue: "When this majority [us] discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections [to the TARP bailout] seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term 'political class' came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond [our] understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the 'ruling class.'

"And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class. Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several 'stimulus' bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations.

"Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to." Well, this resonated with me because I plaintively say, "Why do you Republicans continue to accept their premise on everything and then deal with it on the margins? Why do we accept the premise that there must be a health care overhaul? Why do we accept the premise that there must be a stimulus package? Why do they set the agenda?" This piece is partially the answer: They're all part of the ruling class. The Republicans want to be even more accepted in the ruling class. They want to be even more powerful. They want to be considered part of it. They want to be in the clique.

And as such, they do not wish to make any waves. "Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about 'global warming' for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place." Peter Jennings, after the House elections of 1994, said, "The American people threw a temper tantrum." Peter Jennings, as all of the Nightly News anchors are, was part of the ruling class. No participant in talk radio will ever be a member of the ruling class, and the day that a talk radio personality becomes a member of the ruling class is the end of that talk radio personality's career.

"No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children ... The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it. Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter.

"The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and 'bureaucrat' was a dirty word for all. So was 'social engineering.' Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed. Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.

"These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints." You must believe in this, or you cannot be in the ruling class. "Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the 'in' language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector.

"Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government." There is a story. This piece, when you read it in toto, will have you reacting to everything you see in dominant media, mainstream media in a different way. By the way, the media (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times) are all part of the ruling class. They're not journalists. They're all part of the ruling class or want to be part of the ruling class.

So Jim VandeHei and Zachary Abrahamson yesterday in Politico, reality gap: "U.S. Struggles, D.C. Booms ... The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country." This is in Washington. "And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area. As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.'s powerful when it comes to their economic reality -- and their economic perceptions.

"A new Politico poll, conducted by market research and consulting firm Penn Schoen Berland, underscores the big divide: Roughly 45 percent of 'Washington elites' said the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while [only] 25 percent of the general population said they felt that way. The sample of Washington elites was aware of its propitious situation: Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said the economic downturn has hurt them less than most Americans. They should be self-aware, given the economic indicators for people who live and work in the area." Victor Davis Hanson on July 17th, a little post here at the National Review Corner: "It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast, and even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush I ('Poppy') for boating in the summer off the preppie-sounding Kennebunkport.

"The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democratic. One can use an entire array of evidence -- the preponderance of Wall Street money that went to Obama over McCain in 2008, the liberal voting patterns of the high-income blue-state congressional districts, the anecdotal evidence of a Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or the ease by which an eco-populist like Al Gore buys estates and creates corporations, or the rarified tastes of men of the people like John Edwards of two-nations fame, or John Kerry of multiple estate residences. Bill Clinton was perhaps the first liberal president to embarrass progressive populists, who by rote caricatured those who played golf or amassed millions in post-presidential huckstering. The point is that Barack Obama's 'them' rhetoric against those who supposedly make tons of money and won't pay enough in taxes to fund the Obama technocratic class's redistribution schemes seems almost fossilized. ...

"In short, Obama had better get the populist photo-ops down a lot better, since his calls to soak the rich from the 18th hole or the coastal vacation home look increasingly ridiculous." Well, they look increasingly ridiculous to us, but they are applauded by Obama's fellow members of the ruling class. I could spend the whole show on this piece today. I could spend the next two hours and 15 minutes dissecting this and relating it to things that I have said over the past 20 years or news items that happen to be prominent today. It's that good. It is that thorough and it is that explanatory -- and, most importantly, it is easily understandable by all who read it. Here's what I said January 19th, 2009, on TARP: "However, this is the danger. When the government gives you money, they do have some say-so over how you use it.

"In fact, in most cases, if somebody gives you money, they're going to try to exercise some control over either how you use it, or when you give it back, or how you pay it back, one of those things. When somebody gives you something, you owe 'em, big time. Even though you think it's not a loan, you get a gift, here in the areas we're talking about, you're in for it. But aren't we creating, aren't we just redoing the same thing that got us in all this mess in the first place, letting incompetent, unqualified members of Congress tell the banks what they must do and how they must run their business? So we're not bailing out banks. It's clear now we're not bailing out banks. We are taking control of them. That's what this is."

That's how I described TARP on January 19th, 2009. And if you'll recall back then, none of us supported that bailout. We didn't buy the unified claims of disaster that were coming from all corners of the political and financial worlds. The unison was just too much, and they were all saying the same thing, and even the members of the ruling class financial media said, "Neil, if we don't act for 24 hours, it could be a disaster!" and Cavuto was saying, "I don't buy it. I don't buy that we're in that great a danger. Nobody's shown me the evidence of it." We still had to do it -- and Republicans joined right in, McCain joined right in with making all this happen. It's a great piece. Once again, it's "The Ruling Class," by Angelo Codevilla, American Spectator, the July-August 2010 issue.

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RUSH: The two classes, the ruling class and us, the country class, and the ruling class is a minority. It's 10 to 15% of the thinking of the country, if that. "The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, 'prayed to the same God.' By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God 'who created and doth sustain us,' our ruling class prays to itself as 'saviors of the planet' and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over 'whose country' America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: 'if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.' ... Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us? The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector.

Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a 'newocracy': a 'new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy,'" those of us who think doing great things will get us into the big clique. "In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude. Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists.

"Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative 'nonprofit' and 'philanthropic' sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances."

Brief time-out. You see, I could go on with this the whole show. I'm still on page three and I haven't even shared everything on pages one and two with you.

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RUSH: Membership in the ruling class depends much less on high academic achievement. It depends on something far more important, and that is a willingness to say, act, believe, and recite the things the ruling class believes, whether you're a failure at what you do or not.BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is just too important, it is just too right on, right on, right on, Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class, in the July-August issue of the American Spectator. Now, as I mentioned at the top of this, being the best at what you do does not get you into the ruling class. You can be the best at what do and have no prayer of getting into the ruling class just as in high school you coulda been cool and all that and if you just weren't judged to be right you're not going to get in the big clique. Nobody ever gets outta high school except it gets more serious as the big cliquers graduate from high school and move on.

Angelo Codevilla: "Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs." So when Trent Lott says, "Tea Party? We're going to have to find a way to co-opt 'em if they win a lot of power in the Senate." That's exactly what the ruling class wants to hear.

"Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts. If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can 'write' your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain." In other words, you don't write it; your assistant does. "A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was 'inadvertent,' and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that 'closes' the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about 'global warming' to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps."

So, it is a great example. Everybody totally lied. Not one genuine, authentic action by a whole cadre of people, but the circle the wagons. Dan Rather, the George Bush National Guard story proven to be based on fake documents. What happened? Brokaw and Peter Jennings circled the wagons, and the big members of the ruling class of journalism gave Rather a career award. And none of them did anything right. But they are in the ruling class. Now, instinctively, all of us know this, instinctively we think something's not right here. These people claim to be the best and brightest, and yet the real best and brightest, the smartest among us, the people who actually make the country work are looked upon with disdain, and they are discounted, no matter where they are, and particularly if they happen to live in the South.

"Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's 'top schools' is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that 'the best' colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in." The conformists; the people who will sacrifice their own identity; the people who will sacrifice who they really are in order to be accepted by people they think are their betters.

"The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records," i.e., Obama. "Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority." They think they're smarter than everybody else and in truth they are dumbing everyone -- Ted Kennedy, a classic example of the ruling class, cheated in college, responsible for the death of a girl, and look, he became such a lion that even Karl Rove admired him, a lion in the Senate. People wanted to be Ted Kennedy, a distinct member of the ruling class.

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RUSH: Gary in Seattle, you're next. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: The 15 hours a week has meant a lot to me for about 20 years.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: And I'm constantly amazed at how you remain relevant after that much time.

CALLER: Well, your opening monologue today in particular resonated with me. It illustrated something I've felt for a long time but also reminded me of a point in your history where I disagreed with you, and that was back in the primaries leading up to the 2008 election when you came out a little bit harsh on Governor Huckabee for his populism and did what I think at the time pretty much sink his candidacy, partly because I think you represent the non-ruling class, and you represent the attitudes and feelings of a great many Americans, many of whom I believe are Democrat. I know that you have a reputation in the Drive-By Media as representing only a slim group of Republicans, but I don't believe your program would have been or continue to be as successful as it is if you didn't tap into what I think is essentially a broad-based feeling in America that's evidenced today in the Tea Party movement and in the candidacies of some of these new faces and new voices in America that I think represent the same kind of the things that Governor Huckabee and Sarah Palin represented in terms of a non-ruling class, open-minded candidate that sought to tap into the frustrations that you've tapped into for 20 years. So I think the only mistake I've ever heard from you -- and I know you're correct 99-point whatever percent of the time.

RUSH: Ninety-nine-point-six.

CALLER: Yeah. But that .4 probably for me was at that point in time when we lost Governor Huckabee's voice for issues that I think were prescient and are particularly needed right now.

RUSH: Wait a second. Did I lose things for Governor Huckabee or did he make a deal with John McCain?

CALLER: Well, I think in the end you're right, that he did make a deal with John McCain --

RUSH: I think so.

CALLER: Yeah, all of that was history, but at the very point when you began to depart from his candidacy because of his populism, I'm not sure that you were as in touch then as you are now to the seething anger that's motivating the grassroots in America right now. America is tired, Rush, of anti-capitalism. The country has an abiding faith in capitalism.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And capitalism, even if you're a labor union member or a public corporation executive, capitalism is the only means for people of all stripes to accumulate the capital necessary to forward their lives.

RUSH: Here's the thing. You have just swerved into something. That's what we in the country class believe. The people in the ruling class have proved it's not true. The most incompetent, the most inexperienced can get wealthy. They simply have their snoots in the public trough of government money. They live off government. That's one of the points of Mr. Codevilla's piece here and really, when you get down to it, folks, it's all about money, always follow the money. The left and the ruling class love to say that they do things out of altruism, out of compassion, big hearts, and these people are a bunch of lazy SOBs who have no business in the private sector 'cause they can't succeed there. The only way they can succeed is to be a bunch of brownnosers in the ruling class and try to move their way up that ladder and get whatever they can out of the public trough. The ruling class has gotten rich off of government. It has not gotten rich in the private sector and therefore the private sector does threaten them. The private sector is where the ruling class would fail. The ruling class is essentially made up of people who have never even been in the private sector, never held a job, never made a payroll, don't understand at all.

These are the kind of people, Obama and Steve Rattner and these guys that come along after they buy up Chrysler and GM and order all these dealerships closed under the guise of saving money or saving the industry, when in fact they put a whole bunch of people out of work, and in the process they shut down a lot of economic activity in communities where these dealerships were. They're threatened by the private sector. They couldn't compete with the average successful person in the private sector. What's maddening about this is that they have the audacity and the gall to portray themselves as better than us, better than everybody else, smarter. We're too stupid, you see, to understand what's best for us. That's why we need them in charge of our health care; that's why we need them in charge of our salt intake, of our trans fat intake and obesity for our children. That's why they're talking about dinners now being served in school, because parents simply aren't responsible enough to feed their kids right, otherwise they'll be fat slobs and put strain on the American health care system. This is an insidious bunch of people.

The ruling class has a fear. They know that they are a minority and they know that their time is gonna come. They know that their ruling class status can't be sustained. It hasn't been throughout history. There have always been revolutions. And this piece, by the way, Mr. Codevilla touches on what happens next. What is the revolution because he points out that the ruling class of today is far more discriminatory and punishing than King George was of the colonists in the days of our revolution, and the Tea Party is the modern equivalent of our revolutionary. But how do they do it? In our structure today, he points out they need a party. The tea party needs a political mechanism in order to revolt and replace the ruling class. And if it's the Republican Party -- well, I'll not try to paraphrase what Mr. Codevilla says. I'll make sure I share with you his point on that as the program unfolds. But, you know, you talk about Huckabee, I opposed Huckabee and McCain during the primaries, and McCain was part of the ruling class. I mean when you talk about reaching across the aisle, when your campaign slogan is, "I can work with the other side and be bipartisan," you're basically acting as a slave to the ruling class, saying, (imitating McCain) "Please, accept me, accept me, I want to be in your group, see, I'll work with you, I'll sell my side out, just to be with you, I'm getting old, I want to be happy before I pass away."

Folks, human nature is human nature. Doesn't matter whether you're in high school or even if you achieved power in high school, what does it mean, you got the cheerleader, big deal. You achieve power in Washington, and become a member of the ruling class, you really don't have to work in order to become wealthy. You do not. This is the point. We in the country class believe that success and wealth, however we define it, is the result of achievement, competence, merit. It's not rewarded in the ruling class. In fact, it is disdained. Merit, accomplishment, achievement, it's almost a threat to many. At the end of the day would you trust Barack Obama to run anything in your personal life? Would you trust him to run your business, be a CEO, a COO, would you trust him to do that? Would you trust Barney Frank? Would you trust Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd? Of course you would not. Who's running the show nevertheless? I ask you.

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RUSH: Harry Truman! Harry Truman like Ronaldus Magnus was never, definitely never admitted to the ruling class. And here's a great quote from Harry Truman: "I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here." Truman never figured it out, which is why he was never admitted into the ruling class.

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RUSH: "The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class [us] disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled [us] to shut up and obey. The ruled [us] want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail.

"The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable," but it's coming, and "In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them" and we have, "are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough.

"Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class [us] wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two-to-one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat [for them], while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain. Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class [us] has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party," not a third party!

"[T]hrough the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country 'into the ditch' all alone. But they had a hand in it."

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RUSH: Bill in Arlington, Texas, welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush, just another fake caller calling in. I think this has been a brilliant show today, bringing up this piece. I'm so pleased to see it.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I have been a Republican Party activist all my adult life. I've been doing this for 40 years now, and I'm also a Tea Party activist. Obviously for those of us who are Republicans, we have been so pleased to see the rise of the tea parties because the people that are coming in are really no different than us. Now, what I need to point out is there's a real difference between the grassroots of the party, who are Goldwaterites, Reaganites, by and large, and the elected party, the people in office. And this is where this piece today, it hints on this, it talks about how the country party, you know, achieves political power. Well, for the time being, he's pointing out, it has to be through the Republican Party. I think that can be done in the long run, but the key is the country party has to understand how to take over the Republican Party. And it's very possible, but it's made more difficult because of a whole series of laws that have restricted access to the ballot and access to the parties over the years.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: But there have been an interesting series of Supreme Court decisions going back to a decision in 1952 called Ray vs. Blair that established the constitutional rights of association that a political party has to decide who it wants to associate with. That's not only who its members are, but who its candidates on the ballot will be. Now, this is a state-by-state thing. But in the long run, if people begin to understand how they can take over their state parties and start to control who their nominees for office are, then you can achieve the revolution through the party. The other option, as the author has pointed out, is form a new party, but that is much more difficult today than it was a hundred years ago.

RUSH: Well, that's not even thinkable. I mean that just guarantees the ruling class will have power in perpetuity. Look, since you brought it up, let me go to that section of the piece on what to do now, what can we, the country party, do. I'll give you another great illusion of the ruling party, the ruling class. You can look at the election contest between John McCain and J. D. Hayworth for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona. During the campaign for president in 2008, McCain could not tell us enough how we had nothing to fear from an Obama administration. He would always tell us, (imitating McCain) "My friends, you have nothing to fear. Nothing whatsoever to fear from an Obama administration." However, he would never say that about Hayworth, about Hayworth he will tell Arizonans, "You have everything to fear about J. D. Hayworth," a fellow Republican. But he would never, ever tell people in a presidential campaign that they had anything to fear from an Obama administration. There's the ruling class in action.

Now, McCain, for all I know, might have thought that the Obama administration would be a disaster, but he would never say so. That would exempt him from membership in the ruling class, and he had worked very hard to gain that membership. He had gone on a lot of television shows and ripped into his own party. He had worked very hard. The media, it was said, was his base at one time. Now, we warned Mr. McCain once the ruling class has its own candidate, you are not going to have the media in your camp, and it turned out to be the case. Now, here's Mr. Codevilla in the American Spectator piece, "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution ... Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s."The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country 'into the ditch' all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one." But that's bad news.

Now, we are taking over the Republican Party. A lot's going to depend on the presidential nominee as well. Our battle is as much with those in the Republican Party who defend statism as with the radicals in the Democrat Party. It's a two-step process. It can be done, it was done with Reagan, and Reagan was not 200 years ago. This is where I disagree with Mr. Codevilla a little bit. It can be done. But even the ruling class undermined Reagan, second term, managing to take advantage of various things to get ruling class members into his administration, chief of staff, and other positions of influence. Now, "to defend the country class --" that's us "-- to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited."

They call us all these names hoping to dispirit us. They call the Republicans all these names hoping to dispirit them. And it's worked. The Republicans are not gonna criticize Obama because they're scared to death of being called racist. If you want a short answer to, "Why don't the Republicans do X?" it's because they're afraid to death of being called racist by the ruling class and the ruling class media. Or they're afraid to be called fundamentalist or shills for business or what have you. So the intimidating tactics of disrespecting and silencing your opponents has worked, and this is what we must do, is Mr. Codevilla's point. "For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control 'climate change,' and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them." And this we have said over and over again.

There is going to be an apparatus in place, thanks to these people, to use the power of government against them when we get it back. The question is will the people that represent us have the guts to do so? "How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty -- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough." So it must be a self-starting thing. It can't be the result of phone calls. It can't be the result of faxes and all this to Washington. It has to start on its own, and guess what the Tea Party is? It's exactly that. But it can't be the result of members of Congress calling people, "Hey, come to Washington, we need to have a strong force here to oppose this or that, 20,000 bodies." No, no, no. It's gotta happen on its own. It can't happen by being imposed upon. I understand what he means by that.

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RUSH: Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus, Boston University, wrote the piece in the American Spectator: "The Ruling Class." It's linked to at RushLimbaugh.com if you don't know the American Spectator's web address. We shut down their website early today when we first recommended it, but they're back up and running now. But it is a brilliant piece, folks, and it's important. It's not often that I say that. I was shopping for antiques once just for the hell of it. I mean, it was no big deal. It was in Paris, and I noticed the technique of the salespeople. I'm looking at some supposed relic from the regime of Louis the "Fow-teenth," as they said.

"This is an important piece."

I said, "What's important about it?"

"Well, it's just an important piece."

I thought, "Well, this is a scam. It's important? Important to who?"

Well, I very seldom use the word important, and this piece is important. It's important, and I'm gonna admit one of the reasons I am captivated by it is that it encapsulates things that I have been saying for 20 years or maybe 15 years. I was excited to read this because it lays it all out. Now, this piece is going to be ignored. You take a look, you notice which so-called conservative websites ignore this piece. You take a look at which conservative blogs, media sites ignore it. And it will answer a lot of the questions. It will be ignored by a lot of Republican leaders -- and those who ignore it, or those who rip it to shreds, will be telling you who they are or who they want to be (i.e., members of the ruling class). You know, the reason Reagan could never get in? Reagan said, "I don't care who gets credit, as long as it gets done." Ha! The rule class is all about getting credit even when it fails, getting credit for doing it right.

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RUSH: Bob in Pittsburgh, it's great to have you on the program, sir, hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. You know, there's a guy I used to listen to a long time ago named Jeff Christie? I don't know whether you ever met him. Really good guy, but I really do like listening to Rush Limbaugh instead of Jeff Christie.

RUSH: Yeah, but that was all he was allowed to talk about was the stupid music.

CALLER: It was a fun time.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Speaking of my favorite sign for tea party these days should say, "It doesn't matter what this sign says, you'll still call it racist."

RUSH: Yeah, that sign has shown up at every tea party gathering, and it is true.

CALLER: I want a bumper sticker with that on it, and I'm actually thinking about buying one. There's a place where you can buy bumper stickers and I'm thinking buying one and putting it on there and giving it to a few people.

RUSH: You know, this also explains -- we had a caller who was going to mention this but the caller dropped off. This also explains the hysterical reaction to Sarah Palin. It totally explains the reaction to Sarah Palin. She doesn't give a rat's rear end about being part of the ruling class and represents a big threat to it. I've always told you: The ruling class will tell you who they most fear.